"Drink" for vocal critics / WED 5-20-26 / Epitome of slowness / Protagonist of "That '70s Show" / Musical notation that means "with vigor" / Boardroom bigwig, in brief / European city that "waits for you," in a Billy Joel tune / Establishment that serves zombies, perhaps / "Essential" product used as an anti-acne treatment / Spot to drink a matcha with a Manx / Florence-based fashion house

Constructor: Kathleen Duncan

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "ISN'T THAT SPECIAL!" (58A: Condescending rhetorical question ... or what you might say about 16-, 26- and 44-Across) — three things that might be called "special":

Theme answers:

• OFF-YEAR ELECTION (16A: Nontraditional time for voting someone into office)
• SOUP OF THE DAY (26A: What a waiter might offer to start you off)
• VISUAL EFFECT (44A: Bit of movie magic)

Word of the Day: Zombie (1A: Establishment that serves zombies, perhaps = TIKI BAR) —

The zombie is a tiki cocktail made of fruit juices, liqueurs, and various rums. It first appeared in late 1934, invented by Donn Beach at his Hollywood Don the Beachcomber restaurant. It was popularized on the East coast soon afterwards at the 1939 New York World's Fair. // Legend has it that Donn Beach originally concocted the zombie to help a hung-over customer get through a business meeting. The customer returned several days later to complain that he had been turned into a zombie for his entire trip. Its smooth, fruity taste works to conceal its extremely high alcoholic content. Don the Beachcomber restaurants limited their customers to two zombies apiece because of their potency, which Beach said could make one "like the walking dead." // According to the original recipe, the zombie cocktail included three different kinds of rum, lime juice, falernum, Angostura bitters, Pernod, grenadine, and "Don's Mix", a combination of cinnamon syrup and grapefruit juice. // Beach was very cautious with the recipes of his original cocktails. His instructions for his bartenders contained coded references to ingredients, the contents of which were only known to him. Beach had reason to worry; a copy of the zombie was served at the 1939 New York World's Fair by a man trying to take credit for it named Monte Proser (later of the mob-tied Copacabana). [...] The cocktail is named in the lyrics for the song "Haitian Divorce" on the 1976 album The Royal Scam by Steely Dan. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well, this one started out hot—strong cocktails, right out of the gate...

... and then you get a few crosses, layer in some HATERADE (14A: "Drink" for focal critics), and then boom, there goes the first themer (which I actually got without having to look at the clue) (you solve Monday puzzles Downs-only for long enough, and you get real good at pattern recognition):

And then you cross all that with "IT FIGURES..."? Yes, I was pretty happy coming out of the NW corner (not something I say a ton). The puzzle sort of faded from there, though. It didn't crash and burn; it just kind of ... wilted. The fill gets extremely weak in that central choppy section (all 3-4-5s)—it was like falling down stairs, moving through that section, and when I landed at the bottom of the stairs, I turned around and took a picture (for insurance purposes—those are faulty stairs!):

You start out firmly in crosswordese territory with LIRE / ODIN, and then, once you round the corner into the middle of the grid, you go CFO NOLO HOOHA YOM HODA DEL ALEAP, clunk clunk clunk clunk, hitting your head on every step. It was like those answers were sounds I was involuntarily uttering with each impact. The rest of the fill holds up OK (your EKEs and your SLOs notwithstanding), but the good vibes of the NW become a kind of distant memory, and the theme ... sigh (he SIGHED). I want to like it, and I think there's a cleverish idea here, but the specials are inconsistently special. For the first and third, "Special" can simply precede the last word in the phrase in order to describe what you're talking about, e.g. an OFF-YEAR ELECTION is a "special election," a VISUAL EFFECT is a "special effect." But SOUP OF THE DAY works differently. That's just a "special." Unless it's supposed to evoke the phrase "special of the day," but ... that phrase tends to refer more to entrees. A SOUP OF THE DAY is not the "special of the day." It's just ... a special—an example of an offering not typically on the menu. I think the thing that's bugging me most about the theme, though, is VISUAL EFFECT.  All "special effects" are visual. So VISUAL EFFECT feels like just a dumb adjective swap-out (VISUAL for "special"), and a bad one, in that VISUAL EFFECT feels the less natural-sounding term. "Special effects," common phrase; "VISUAL EFFECTs," less so. Those two phrases are basically synonyms, whereas the other themers are examples of a type. An OFF-YEAR ELECTION is a kind of special election. SOUP OF THE DAY is a kind of restaurant special. VISUAL EFFECT is just a weaker way of saying "special effect." (although according to this wikipedia entry on "visual effects," they're actually increasingly distinct from "special effects," with "special" referring to mechanical effects and "visual" referring to digital). There's just something slightly off, slightly loose and clunky, about the way the theme is executed. But like I say, the core idea is at least interesting ... and we'll always have that NW corner.

Pretty easy solve today. I have no idea what SAGE OIL is, so that took some hacking (48A: "Essential" product used as an anti-acne treatment). I've heard of TEA TREE OIL, but not SAGE OIL, but then I've never had much of an acne problem, so this is really beyond my purview. Took me a bunch of crosses to see MOLASSES (it's perfectly clued, I just couldn't think beyond tortoise ... why is the tortoise and the hare story stuck in my head?) (38D: Epitome of slowness). The worst mistake I made today—maybe the only true mistake—was writing in TAKE POWER instead of TAKE POINT (32D: Be in charge, informally). TAKE POINT is apparently a military term, which is funny to me, as I always assumed it came from basketball (since the point guard typically runs the team's offense). And I know the phrase, when used metaphorically, as "run point." TAKE POWER really felt right, and as you can see, it has all but three of the same letters as the actual answer, so that slowed me down. The clue does say "informally," and there's nothing particularly "informal" about TAKE POWER, so I probably shouldn't have pulled the trigger on it. But I had TAKE PO-! How was I supposed to lay off?

Bullets:

• 15A: European city that "waits for you," in a Billy Joel tune ("VIENNA") — this song has a funny history. It never charted—I don't think it was even released as a single—but it became one of the most popular songs in Joel's repertoire and is somehow now a certified triple platinum record (!?). Apparently the movie 13 Going on 30 (2004), which featured "VIENNA," really caused the song to blow up. Anyway, it's a charming song. 

• 64A: Words a teenager might say with an eye roll ("YES, DAD") — the "eye roll" got me; I was expecting a lot more surface sass. Something slangy, maybe. But no, just a straight phrase of assent, dripping with teen exasperation.
• 1D: Mustachioed president who succeeded another mustachioed president (TAFT) — four-letter mustachioed president = TAFT. The mustache is all you need to know "not BUSH." Oh, crap, I forgot about POLK! POLK did not have a mustache—just really high collars and (by the looks of it) a need to consume human blood. 

[POLK! (p.s. the other "mustachioed president" mentioned in the clue was T.R.)]

• 9D: Careful, this might be hot! (MIC) — gah, a hot MIC. I was like "MAC ... because MAC & cheese ... is hot?"
• 62A: John in the sketch "The Fish Slapping Dance" (CLEESE) — this was way harder than it should've been because I read the clue as [Join in the sketch "The Fish-Slapping Dance"] and could not fathom how one might do that.
• 25D: Spot to drink a matcha with a Manx (CAT CAFE) — do they really have purebred cats in CAT CAFEs? I've still never been in one. I love cats, obvs, but something about trying to drink / eat around that many strange cats gives me ... paws.

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Gorp tidbit / TUE 5-19-26 / Standard musical progression / Football, informally / Massachusetts local of Manchester-by-the-Sea / Joint thing in the Venn diagram of "instruments" and "fish" / Heads of Hogwarts? / Companion to Fannie and Freddie in the mortgage biz / Classic falling-block game

Constructor: Brad Wiegmann

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: TWO-DRINK MINIMUM (52A: Requirement at some comedy clubs ... or for 17-, 22-, 33- and 47-Across?) — there are two drinks "hidden" inside each theme answer:

Theme answers:

• PENTATONIC SCALE (17A: Standard musical progression)
• CHAIR UMPIRE (22A: High court judge?)
• TEAM SPORT (33A: Basketball or baseball, but not boxing)
• TWIN ENGINES (47A: Matching pair on many jets)

Word of the Day: SUE Bird (19D: Bird of the W.N.B.A.) —

Suzanne Brigit Bird (born October 16, 1980) is an American former professional basketball player who played her entire career with the Seattle Storm of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA). Bird was drafted first overall pick by the Storm in the 2002 WNBA draft and is considered one of the greatest players in WNBA history. As of 2025, Bird is the only WNBA player to win titles in three different decades. In 2025 she was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame and the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, and in 2026 she was inducted into the NYC Basketball Hall of Fame and the FIBA Hall of Fame. In addition to her WNBA career, Bird played for three teams in the Russian league. [...] Bird has won a joint-record four WNBA championships with the Storm (2004, 2010, 2018, 2020), five Olympic gold medals (2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020), two NCAA Championships with UConn (2000, 2002), and four FIBA World Cups (2002, 2010, 2014, 2018). She is one of only 11 women to attain all four accolades, and is one of only two basketball players—of any gender—to win five Olympic gold medals. She is also a five-time EuroLeague Women champion (2007–2010, 2013) // During Bird's WNBA career, she was selected to thirteen WNBA All-Star teams and eight All-WNBA teams. She was voted by fans as one of the WNBA's Top 15 Players of All Time in 2011, was voted into the WNBA Top 20@20 as one of the league's top 20 players of all time in 2016, and was voted into The W25 as one of the league's top 25 players of all time in 2021. Bird retired from professional basketball after the 2022 WNBA season.

• • •

I kinda like this theme, or want to like it, but the overall fill was so abusively stale today, from almost square one, that I found it hard to enjoy the puzzle. Unless you are a mathematician, I suppose, ENNEADS is one of those words that exists only in crosswords. It always seems like such desperate fill, and to encounter it right away was really deflating. And then to get AER right after that, on top of slightly less annoying but still slightly annoying gnat-like answers like CPA and AWS and SERE ... it just felt like not nearly enough care went into polishing the grid. "I've seen it in crosswords before, must be OK." Even SMORE and IOWAN felt like they were out of Central Crosswords Casting. I don't mind short simple words, but I do mind a barrage of words that scream "crosswords! you know me from crosswords! hey, how ya doin'? nice to see me again?" No. We're still doing Beau GESTE? In 2026? On a Tuesday? We're still doing EGAD? EGAD. As for the theme—TWO-DRINK MINIMUM is a really interesting revealer. It's a snappy phrase in its own right, and it kinda indicates what's going on in the theme. Kinda. I have two picky things to say about TWO-DRINK MINIMUM, though. One is, with these phrases, you don't have a TWO-DRINK MINIMUM. You have two drinks exactly. If one of these phrases had three drinks in it, I think my mind would've been blown, because that would've captured precisely the spirit (!) of the phrase. That is, it would've made the "MINIMUM" part seem something other than extraneous when it came to the execution of the theme. The other thing I found mildly annoying was the highlighting of the "drinks" inside the theme answers. Visually ugly and completely unnecessary. Let Me Discover The Drinks!!! You let me discover the SMALL STARTS yesterday, you can let me discover the "two drinks" today. Having those "drinks" outlined in bold felt condescending. If you want to do something in the app where the "drinks" light up or bubble or explode or whatever once you're finished, I guess I don't care about that. But flagging them ahead of time? Bah. Child's placemat stuff.

The puzzle was also very easy. The fill was clued in an extremely straightforward manner, for the most part. There are a handful of "?" clues to try to make things at least a little twisty, but they didn't add much difficulty in the end. After wanting to cram in YOU ARE at 1A: What you eat, I then wrote in FOOD. Also wrong! But that was my only mistake of the day. Oh, and I had CAT POSE before COW POSE and BON AMIE before MON AMIE (39D: Term of friendship for a French woman) (should've known BON AMIE was wrong—for a woman, it would be BONNE AMIE). Other than that, there was exactly one clue that made me stop long enough to think "huh?" And that was 34D: Leaves together? (PILE). I knew right away that "Leaves" was going to be a noun rather than a verb (I've seen enough "leaves" puns in TEA and SALAD clues to last me a lifetime), but SALAD wouldn't fit and I couldn't think of a four-letter TEA starting with "P" so ... I had to work the crosses. Yes, if you rake a bunch of leaves "together," you do get a PILE. I had trouble making the leap from mere "togetherness" to a PILE structure specifically. Perhaps if this puzzle had come out in autumn, the connection would've been clearer. This clue is the only one I'd classify as "difficulty" in the whole puzzle. The rest is (mostly) remedial trivia and straight definitions.

Bullets:

• 42A: Heads of Hogwarts? (LOOS) — gratuitous Potterization. Always a bad choice. Grow up. ("Heads" are toilets, which is where this clue belongs)
• 60A: Breads for Reuben sandwiches (RYES) — I was all set to say "there shouldn't be any drinks in this puzzle outside the theme answers!" and then realized that this was a bread clue, not a whiskey clue. No foul!
• 29A: Joint thing in the Venn diagram of "instruments" and "fish" (BASS) — I see what you're doing here, but no. They're spelled the same, but they are not the same, and so would not be a "joint thing" in a Venn diagram. Unless you can play the fish like an instrument, in which case, I withdraw my objection.

• 30A: "That's so sweet!" reactions / 46A: "Ick!" ("AWS" / "EWW!") — you can have one one of these reactions, but you may not have two. Eww, no. One. One awkwardly-spelled reaction maximum! This applies also to U.S. state demonyms. You used yours up with IOWAN, puzzle! You can't then try to shove ALASKAN down my throat. Violation!
• 45D: Major unknowns (BIG IFS) — probably my favorite thing in the puzzle. Nice and slangy. A lot more lively than your run-of-the-mill shorter fill. Oh, I also liked PIGSKIN (25D: Football, informally). Apparently I just like "-IG" words.
• 8D: Gorp tidbit (RAISIN) — this wasn't my favorite clue, but I am enjoying saying "Gorp Tidbit" over and over. "Hey, who's that new guy over in Accounting?" "Oh, that's Gorp Tidbit." "I'm sorry, who?" "Gorp Tidbit." "Gorp Tidbit? Where's he from?" "Uh ... I don't know. Vermont, maybe?" 

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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❤️ Support this blog ❤️: 

• Venmo (@MichaelDavidSharp)]

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• Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)

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